It’s hard not to become desensitised to the excessive hyper-violence playing out before you, which has clearly been employed to patch up what is an agonisingly threadbare plot.
As it progressed, Jay’s enthusiasm for the ruling passion of his life, and McCallum’s paternal affection for his somewhat unworldly bezzie mate, won me over.
A Canadian gaming fan sets out to acquire all 678 Nintendo games.
Nise - The Heart Of Madness is a brilliantly rendered slice of history which touches on numerous subjects and really does justice to the people it portrays.
The story of Nise da Silveira, a former political prisoner who transformed a psychiatric institution with creativity and art.
The journey to this point for Sierra speaks of the passion project that it is - and the film benefits hugely from his engagement with the emotional aspects of the story.
The story of the East Kilbride factory workers who refused to carry out repairs on warplane engines in an act of solidarity against the violent military coup in Chile.
Made over many months by a tiny cast and crew who themselves lived on the otherwise uninhabited island and sowed and tended the crops there, The Naked Island is both in love with labour, and a labour of love.
Although the film is quite tightly plotted, with the police racing to catch Toro before he strikes again, Jōjō is really more interested in the men’s internal journeys.
Watching bizarre footage of a massacre in a café, a police detective is horrified to recognise something he has seen before.
An intense character study in triplicate, made gripping both by the deliberately ambiguous way in which Christina Choe approaches everyone's mental state and by the performances.
A woman becomes increasingly convinced that she was kidnapped as a child.
The lighting used by cinematographer Rina Yang is some of the best I can recall in an American independent film since Moonlight.
Aisha is an undocumented nanny working for a privileged couple in New York City. As she prepares for the arrival of the son she left behind in Senegal, a violent supernatural presence invades her reality, threatening the American dream she is painstakingly piecing together.
Even at its most epic there's something lacklustre about it all, as if the whole thing were being printed in ink-saving mode.
An epic that details the checkered rise and fall of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his relentless journey to power through the prism of his addictive, volatile relationship with his wife, Josephine.
What makes Narciso striking is the way it acquires a contemporary charge without insisting on it.
Paraguay, 1958. The charismatic Narciso returns from Buenos Aires with rock ’n’ roll in his veins. Under the suffocating military regime, he becomes a music sensation and a symbol of freedom. But then, after his final show, he is found dead…
Considerable courage has gone into acquiring this footage.
Portrait of Nasrin Sotoudeh, who is serving a prison sentence of 38 years in Iran for representing women who protested the country’s mandatory hijab law.
The relationships are well drawn and delicately handled by a capable cast, so one wishes that the script would focus more on them.
A young girl stays with her estranged grandparents in the city while she auditions for an art group. When the family gathers after a long time to celebrate the girl's acceptance into the group, an ugly family secret emerges.
Cinemtographer Noah Collier deserves a lot of credit for keeping himself largely invisible so that people reveal themselves, while working with editor Pablo Proenza, Herbert smoothly brings together these facets so that a bigger picture begins to be formed.
A consideration of the American South’s unreconciled history through a Mississippi
town that mixes antebellum tourism with a community deeply divided over its
past.
Although Lince is consistently good and Ford generally holds her own, the film tends to meander where it should be making more of this.
A young woman and her autistic older brother struggle to understand each other as she tries to cope with caring for him and he tries to solve their problems through fantasy.
Unlike many first-time directors who have the urge to cram more and more in, Nagy and his co-writer Pál Závada instead strip things back, letting the trudge of the men tell its own tale.
A company of soldiers hunt for partisans in occupied Soviet territory during the Second World War.
It's a little bit of an eye-opener and, if you have not considered this issue before, it will provide you with new perspective and new insights into a topic not much explored in the mainstream.
A documentary about the boom of self-published romance novels in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey.
The plotting, though not without cliche, retains a satisfyingly robust quality - dense enough to keep you intrigued without becoming overwrought.
A US diplomat flees Lebanon in 1972 after a tragic incident at his home. Ten years later, he is called back to war-torn Beirut by CIA operatives to negotiate for the life of a friend he left behind.
The idea of casting a 55-year-old actress as a succubus feels like one whose time has come and Bellucci is more than up to the job.
As the eternal fight between Nekromancers and their nemeses rages on, they’ve become locked in a new type of cyber warfare. An app is being designed to send the soul of any user to hell. The fate of all mankind now rests on the shoulders of a sanitation worker and his best friend.
It's Mylène MacKay's committed performance in the lead role that really gives this film its power.
Inspired by the life and works of Nelly Arcan, a sex worker turned international literary star, lost between irreconcilable identities, whose life ended tragically.
Several films have already touched on this subject but few have done so with the pace and fury of Red's work, which never lets its bleak social realism overwhelm the punchy thriller at its core.
Two assassins decide to train a boy who has been marked for death after betraying his gang.
The screenplay and direction deftly let the audience put together the pieces, making the discrepancies plain to see without hitting us over the head with their existence.
Charismatic entrepreneur, Rory, relocates his family to England with dreams of profiting from booming 1980s London. But as his wife, Allison, struggles to adapt, and the promise of a lucrative new beginning starts to unravel, the couple have to face the unwelcome truths lying beneath the surface of their marriage.
While it's great to see female voices being put centre-stage, something more from the websites in the firing line, such as Google, Twitter or Facebook would be a welcome addition.
Three women talk about cyber-stalking and online abuse and the ways in which they have fought back.
Finch has great fun imagining his way into the kind of passionate, dogmatic and slightly unhinged character who has only latterly begun to succeed in the industry in real life.
An ageing news anchor is fired by his network and when an on-air rant boosts ratings, the channel sees an opportunity.
Though some aspects of the film will mean more to you if you have a New Orleans connection, Hunt strives to ensure that it's accessible to everyone.
In December 2015, the New Orleans City Council voted to remove four Confederate monuments from public grounds. A forceful group of critics protested the decision, and fearing retaliation, no crew would agree to remove the statues.
